WhimsyLand

I went to bed last night and couldn't find anything I liked in the poetry section of Colorado Review.  Then, I woke up this morning and gave it a shot again and liked quite a lot.  Does that ever happen to you?  CR is no Fence, but it does have a reputation of being more often outré than accessible.  I've always thought that Jorie Graham and Donald Revell were an interesting pair one might be honored to have as poetry editors, considering the differences in their work.  I'm sure they end up looking at a small percentage of what comes in as submissions, but eventually the Readers must acquire a sense of their preferences.  There's a subgenre of poetry in this CR (and other CR's as well, and for that matter, in a number of progressive litmags) that I might describe as overt disjunction.  When it's not working, it sounds like all that surreal-speak of the 60's when bands named themselves Strawberry Alarm Clock.  When it is working, it has you expecting a certain noun after a certain adjective, only to find a completely new object of description, one with the evocative powers of the best metaphor.  There is a point for me when poetry stretches my sense of expression, when the gestalt lies just beyond my ability to articulate, but within an expanded sense of kenning.  Given enough stretching, however, and the whole collection of verse seems to collapse with self-consciousness.  Elena Karina Byrne's Language Fable/ —civilization depending on it resided on the cusp for me:  "    Because water, fire.  Because food. // Because our "yes" was in Provençal, because our hunger-worth ate / in a Feast of Lanterns, light caught in the mouth, human. // Babel:  traders and navigators. // Slang-bearing to verb a name, scruple, oh uneasiness origin, / God confounded, and does."  I will admit in advance that you can't take these small snippets I'm giving you and make any kind of coherent argument.  James Cummins' Buying a Dog for Margaret was quite a bit more mainstream:  "...// My daughter asks for a dog.  / It seems such a humble request / in the great scheme of things, / a desire expressed each day by thousands, / maybe millions of children, / and turned down by millions of fathers / who have other things to love."  Many of the poems in this issue are either narrative or at least have a sense of temporal, descriptive or thematic flow (and many do not).  Malcolm Alexander's Failure appealed to the minimalist in at least one of the Editors:  "But instead I write / around the idea, // skirting it like a child / does a campfire, // reaching in with a stick / or a thrust of breath, // the coals brightening / for a moment ...".  I had to stop short because 3 more lines and I would have transcribed it in its entirety and probably violating the Fair Use principal.  Zach Barocas's Spiderbird Hunting is similarly linear, but the arc is descriptive:  "The eggs are unhidden / & crack to reveal / mute & wingless chicks who will // hop & swing their lives / tethered to limbs with hair-like / feathers sometimes several / feet in length,".    I liked the way that Chris Dombrowski's Rex's Georgic:  Hunting Morels in Last Year's Burn earned its strangeness by juxtaposing colloquial plainspeak with musical passage:  "Some folks'll rub soot on their face for luck.  Paint warrior-lines and such but it ain't about luck 't all.  Matter of fact you know Chick Alexander?  Judge.  Lost his son Abe when their baseball rolled under the porch.  Right in front of you.  Next to your foot. // Swallowtails, cabbage-whites, the dark scat of denning wolves. / Little azures that love the dung."  Nathan Parker takes us out to the edge again with The Land in a Bell:  "Because sent to us / by green-stomached lambs, we suspect Her // of inner darkness. / We invite her Husband: // in a lane of shining blueberries a bluebird-bitten / bluebird limps to the beat of bell rust,"  It gets even more interesting (though no more alliterative).  There was an odd innocence to Lacy Schutz's poems, considering their level of indirection, this from If You Should Care for Me:  "The 'gan him soft to shrive.  She asked him, What / black ladder must we climb? How sere my grass? / How ravaged my valley? //           You and I, / we seek perfection, mix of brew of horse / manure, of menstrual blood and soil dug from / a dead love's grave." 

More tomorrow.